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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#301

Post by robbyking »

dgzl wrote: post #283
caymanjim wrote: post #75

It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the…

Here's a solution: have tech companies settle in other regions. I know the benefits for being in the bay are substantial, but this problem is entirely brought about by tech companies, not the resident. Employers need to setup shop in less populated places and grow there.

The problem is it's scary to live in a city that only has one employer offering jobs in your field. My wife and I moved to a new city last year, and while we considered a lot of smaller cities, it ultimately wasn't worth the risk to live someplace that only had a couple prospective employers.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#302

Post by hangonhn »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #292
hangonhn wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lumping Mountain View in there with Palo Alto and others is really unfair. MV is doing the best it can but it can't carry all the weight of Bay Area growth. 1/5 housing starts in Santa Clara county was in MV. MV issued more permits than ALL its neighboring cities COMBINED. MV issued more permits than even San Jose. https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/09/28/mountain-view-leads... Unless the whole of Santa Clara county…

That's weird. I was driving around MV and Sunnyvale this weekend and was surprised by how much more residential (apartment complexes/townhoses) building seemed to be happening in Sunnyvale (along Evelyn Ave) than MV. Could it be that these Sunnyvale developments were just issued permits earlier (2016 or 2017), and we're just seeing it further down the pipeline?

MV is issuing permits mostly for townhouses, IIRC. In my neighborhood alone a number of townhouse communities have gone up. One single family home is being replaced by a 4 unit townhouse. So I wonder if that explains the difference. I also think that higher density housing is where we need to go. We don't need to go to high rises just yet but townhouses is much more efficient use of the limit space.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#304

Post by nostrademons »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #292
hangonhn wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lumping Mountain View in there with Palo Alto and others is really unfair. MV is doing the best it can but it can't carry all the weight of Bay Area growth. 1/5 housing starts in Santa Clara county was in MV. MV issued more permits than ALL its neighboring cities COMBINED. MV issued more permits than even San Jose. https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/09/28/mountain-view-leads... Unless the whole of Santa Clara county…

That's weird. I was driving around MV and Sunnyvale this weekend and was surprised by how much more residential (apartment complexes/townhoses) building seemed to be happening in Sunnyvale (along Evelyn Ave) than MV. Could it be that these Sunnyvale developments were just issued permits earlier (2016 or 2017), and we're just seeing it further down the pipeline?

I think that's largely it. MV was radically anti-housing until there was a big shake-up in the city council in 2014 (IIRC 4 grey-haired NIMBYs lost their seats in favor of 20- and 30-something techies and progressive activists). The flood of permits followed after that, and construction lags permitting by several years.

Sunnyvale has been reliably pro-housing since about 2010, which means that a lot of new supply came on the market in 2015 and 2016, which has alleviated the housing supply issue significantly. I left MTV in 2014 after having my rent double in 3 years, from $1400 to $2800; my rent in Sunnyvale has gone up by about $30/month total in the 5 years since, and the 2 BR townhome I'm in now currently rents for less than the 1BR in MTV that I used to live in.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#305

Post by chucksmash »

maxsilver wrote: post #133
chucksmash wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest problems for Google was retention of young talent driven primarily by prohibitively high housing costs. Well, it would surprise me :-) According to levels.fyi, a new grad at Google is clearing $180k/year all-in. Next tier, still not senior, clears $250k/year. That's more than $20k/mo pre-tax. Even at an outrageous $5k rent on a single income and with no roommates, you'r…

> Well, it would surprise me :-) According to levels.fyi, a new grad at Google is clearing $180k/year all-in. Even at an outrageous $5k rent Is that really enough to afford to live? Is that housing cost accurate? A programmer at Google making $180k/yr salary brings in about $9,315.58 in after-tax income (according to PaycheckCalculator). The average house within 10 miles of Google's HQ currently costs about $1.5 mill…

> Is that really enough to afford to live?

Yes. I mean, of course it is. How is that in question even? I live in Manhattan, not the Bay Area, but the sum of my non-housing expenses are less than $4,315 (edit: your $9315 number minus my $5k lol rent) a month and I'm not exactly living that fresh-out-of-the-dorm lifestyle. Remember, this is the new grad number.

> Is that housing cost accurate?

Nope! It's high, obviously. I picked it out of thin air by picking a number we would be unwilling to pay as a two-earner household in NYC and then did a perfunctory check on Zillow to make sure there were Bay Area rentals at that price, which there are.

Yes it's "unfair" in some sense that someone earning that much money can't afford to buy property, but you're moving the goalposts. My point was that a baby Googler could certainly prosper financially, not that Bay Area housing prices were fair.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#306

Post by hindsightbias »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #249
hindsightbias wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did IBM, HP, DEC, Dell, etc build back in the day? For IBM, it was the boonies of Austin, SJ, Boulder, Rochester, Burlington, Poughkeepsie, Hursley, Toronto, Somers, White Plains... companies, services and people moved to them. Do FAANGs have no gravitas? They can’t do better? Yes, in 20 years, you end up with sprawl, but thats better than crashing someone elses hood and wanting it to morph into Manhattan.

There are people who spent their entire career at IBM. If you're willing and able to do that, it doesn't matter so much how many competing employers are nearby. But when today's tenures are under two years, you're going to need to land twenty jobs, not just one.

People in the military move every three years. I know many who were at HP or IBM and worked at 4 or 5 sites, not settling until their kids were in HS or near retirement.

These people probably arent getting fired. They’re flighty, pursuing to dollar, self-actualization, doing good, whatever. Which is perfectly fine and reasonable until they all want to live in the same handful of zipcodes. I just dont understand why society needs to accomodate that anymore than why Jackson Hole should accomadate my need for a $250k 2-bdr condo with ski-out.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#307

Post by robbyking »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #56

Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. So much so, that local politicians even brag about how much housing developments they've stopped. Why fight such a huge uphill battle in trying to get housing in the Bay area? Wouldn't it be easier to start from a city or town outside of CA? or at least outside the bay area? Maybe somewhere in the mi…

>> Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth.

I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but I first moved to SF in 1998, and in my experience it's San Franciscans who moved to the city to work in tech who don't want to see growth. The people who moved there for the culture of art, music, and radical self expression saw the writing on the way pretty early, and have been advocating for affordable, high density housing for decades now.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#308

Post by thrownaway954 »

caymanjim wrote: post #75

It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the…

Have you visited South Florida lately? It sucks here now cause of the amount of people that keep moving into this area. The traffic is horrible, the stores are crowded and people's attitude in general is becoming increasing hostile.

The world doesn't need to be denser, we need some elbow room, we need SPACE. Thanos was right.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#309

Post by abeppu »

They're pitching this as being a benevolent gesture, but

(a) It sounds like they're just becoming a larger real-estate developer? They didn't say "we're donating all this land plus some capital to a housing non-profit"; they're going to receive revenue from their investments. Are we supposed to say thanks?

(b) How does 20k units compare to their impact on Bay Area housing to date?

This is not my area, and I'm not aware of any region that has this requirement, but here's an idea: In the same way that we require large physical development projects to do an environmental impact study, and actively make mitigating affordances (e.g. setting aside land) to offset those impacts .... should employers who intend to hire large numbers of employees from out of the area (sending recruiters to schools across the nation, etc) be required to do housing impact studies, and actively participate in building the housing stock for the new residents they're pulling to an area?

How quickly would the Bay Area housing situation change if the ability of tech companies to grow headcount was tied to their ability to proportionally build housing?

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#310

Post by Shivetya »

caymanjim wrote: post #75

It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the…

Will not matter if zoning laws do change, though I to agree they need to and posted something similar.

What will happen is in many of these same areas they will force rent control upon builders and existing landlords which will do the same work that zoning and political games did before.

California will require a state wide referendum to fix their government created housing problem.

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